This is intended to be a monthly wrap-up, but my memory’s not good enough to go all the way back to the beginning of the month. Therefore, you just get the last few weeks. As a bonus, though, I threw in a few stories from May 1. :)

It will be very interesting to see how this effects the marketing strategy for MySQL, being that MySQL and Oracle DB are direct competitors. With MySQL being open-source, it can’t actually go away, but the focus might change dramatically.

Although I am not an Ubuntu user, I do use Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) as my primary OS at home. This release means that a new version of Mint is in the works and should be released fairly soon.

April 24, 2009

OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 1

The OpenSUSE community released the first milestone of OpenSUSE 11.2. Then, on May 1, they also released an update to OpenSUSE 11.1. I am seriously considering either replacing one of my other distros with the new version of SUSE or installing it as my Linux distro at work. Unfortunately, my attempts to test OpenSUSE 11.1 in VirtualBox have consistently failed miserably.

April 29, 2009

Mandriva 2009.1 came out the other day. I am still working on trying to successfully upgrade to this version, but from what I’ve seen, it looks really good. The new version comes with KDE 4.2 natively and includes quite a few other “enhancements.”

May 1, 2009

Microsoft will apparently let people use Windows 7 without paying for it for a little over a year. Unfortunately, though, they will stop letting you use it at that point if you don’t pay. I think a better model would be to allow beta testers to use Windows 7 perpetually for free, but then start selling it commercially to everyone else.